Let’s Get Real

Photo Courtesy WE CAPTURE MEDIA

Shawnalei Tamayose is taking a bite out of the Big Apple by rising to the top of its real estate empire.

The first time Shawnalei Tamayose sold anything, she was 6 and had to go door to door selling malasadas to her neighbors. She didn’t know it at the time and was just being a dutiful daughter, but years later her mom revealed that their family was down to their last $40 and had to figure out how best to use it. They decided to buy the ingredients for the malasadas.

It turns out that Tamayose was a natural at selling, and years later, she would fundraise for all the extracurricular activities she participated in at Kapa‘a High School, including dance, cheerleading and tennis.

Today, the Kaua‘i native is an award-winning luxury broker, mentor and partner at boutique real estate brokerage APT212 in Soho, New York, and the founder of its luxury division, Aloha Luxury Estates, where she handles $4 million price-point transactions.

Tamayose leads an elite team of 25 agents who are committed to providing discreet, high-touch service to discerning buyers, sellers and developers. The motto for her business is “luxury with purpose,” and 10% of her proceeds go toward efforts to provide clean water, end world hunger and give underprivileged children access to education.

Most recently, she authored Becoming a Real Estate Agent: The Truth You Need to Know, which was released in March and is available online on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart and other retailers.

“The reason why I wrote this book is to write it for my younger self,” Tamayose says. “I wrote it for the person that I felt could’ve been in my shoes and needed a little more guidance.

“Anybody that has been in this business for three years or less, I would recommend this book to them or if they’re thinking about getting into real estate because if they’ve already been in this business for three years and they realize, ‘Hey, my business is not taking off. What am I doing wrong?’ You can take a look at it as a blueprint and see here are the things you need to be doing in order to generate business,” she continues. “I think that if they read this book and then they analyze their own business, they can see where the missing pieces are.”

When Tamayose moved to New York City in December 2010, she was just 23 and planning on living there for maybe a year. That all changed when she experienced the magic of the Big Apple. Falling hard for the city, she told her mom, “Oh, my God, I love it. This is amazing. I’m going to move. This is where my home is going to be.”

She has been in the real estate business for 14 years and has accumulated numerous accolades in that time, including being named the 2023 Most Influential Broker in New York City and the 2022 Emerging Broker at New York City’s Real Estate Development Awards; and being featured in Top Agent Magazine; and making America’s Top 100 Real Estate Agent’s Top 100 People in Real Estate list. She’s taken all her experiences and lessons learned, both in her career and in her personal life, and put them in the heart of her book.

“What makes this book really great is for anyone and any child, really, growing up in a singly-family home, growing up in poverty — I definitely grew up in poverty — and really inspiring people in a way that shows them it doesn’t matter where you come from, it doesn’t matter what your upbringing is, but if you truly want something and you truly want a career in real estate, this is what it’s going to take and are you ready to fully commit yourself and throw yourself into it. Because I’ve spent and I still spend the past 14 years working seven days a week,” Tamayose says.

Some of the topics she covers in her book are how to avoid burnout, how to connect with people, how to build a career out of nothing, and how to build a network and support system.

Tamayose admits that moving away from home to a new city and not having her support system was her biggest obstacle. She’d often reflect on how she was able to do so much back home on The Garden Isle because she had her family — noting that she didn’t have to worry about what she was going to wear for her Miss Hawai‘i pageants (she won titles of Miss Kaua‘i and Miss Lēʻahi) because her mom would purchase her gowns, her auntie would do her hair and makeup, and the rest of her family would offer their unwavering love and support. It made her realize how much all of those things helped her emotionally and how she unknowingly took those things for granted.

“When I came (to New York), and I didn’t have friends and I didn’t have family … I needed to build all of that in addition to be in a city where I was completely out of my element,” she explains. “And I was in a business that I didn’t even know if I was going to survive in or not. There was a lot of mentally difficult days where I missed my family, where I didn’t know if the city was the right city for me because just the way the city operates couldn’t have been any more different than we are back home.”

It was in these moments that Tamayose would rely on her faith and visit Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, where she prayed for things to turn around for her.

“It brought me to my knees and shortly thereafter, my entire business started to change,” she says. “I truly believe it’s because I genuinely put all my faith in God and I promised Him that if He would take me to levels that I couldn’t go to on my own that I would use that for good, and that’s what I’ve done. I have a really close relationship with God … and that stems from all the struggle that I endured. Because I fully came to Him and fully surrendered, I feel like all of these things that I’m doing is a part of a greater purpose.”

It’s these two main lessons she hopes readers learn from her book.

“I hope that they take away the bigger picture, which is two things: one, faith in God, or faith in something bigger than them; and two, with that success, using that success to create a bigger impact in other people’s lives, whether that’s giving back in time, money, or just advice and the impact that you have with people,” Tamayose notes.

“Success in the root of just selfishness holds no meaning,” she continues. “The real meaning behind true success is being able to elevate other people and being able to give back to other people. Because when we are no longer within this world … it’s about the amount of lives you’ve impacted while you were here and I think that is the core message that I want (readers) to feel.”

Tamayose explains that growing up in Hawai‘i has helped her tremendously in the real estate industry.

“(It’s) helped me to show up in my most authentic way, so that people could understand that when I say I’m from Hawai‘i and that I show up differently, you understand why I’m showing up differently. And if you’ve been to Hawai‘i, you get it,” she says. “If you’ve experienced the Hawai‘i heart … (it) isn’t led by money or by what it is we want but we genuinely care about other people and we want what’s best for other people, and we put the relationships before the money.”

Her advice to anyone chasing after their own dreams is this: “If you have a burning desire in your heart or in your mind to accomplish something, then that means that was put in you for a reason. If it never goes away, just because things get a little difficult doesn’t mean that you should give up. Because in that period of difficulty, that’s where you start growing and that’s where you start evolving.

“But if that burning desire to do whatever it is you want to do never fades, it’s because there’s something else bigger than yourself that wants you to do it. There’s meaning behind it. You just have to find out what that meaning is.”